Saturday, May 31, 2014

WHATEVER else you
might think of Sue Bradford, she sticks to her principles. You have to respect
her for walking away in disgust from the Internet-Mana pantomime.

Who, other than
the most gullible, is going to believe these two parties have genuine shared
concerns? They are united only by rank opportunism.

Hone Harawira
needs access to Kim Dotcom’s bank account, while Herr Dotcom seems driven by a
personal grudge against John Key and a need for political friends who might
help him avoid extradition. These are hardly a sound basis for a credible
political party.

In his desperation
to make the merger look honourable, Harawira argues that Internet access is
a pressing issue for young Maori. This is a convenient but very recent
conversion. When I last looked, digital access wasn’t even mentioned on the
Mana website.

The $200,000 that
Dotcom reportedly put into the Internet Party [note: since this column was written, we've learned the sum is $3 million] is a far more likely
explanation for Harawira’s enthusiasm. But at least he had the decency to
grin cheekily when he admitted coveting his new ally’s resources. Like Winston
Peters, he often gives the game away by grinning when he knows no one is
fooled.

Unfortunately a
mischievous grin can’t disguise the truth that this alliance is a cynical
exploitation of a deeply flawed electoral system. Theoretically at least, there is a
possibility that Internet-Mana will end up in a classic tail-wags-dog position of power that bears no
relationship to its voter support.

What’s more, the
two parties have undertaken to review their relationship six weeks after the
election. So if they get into Parliament, all bets will be off. Take that,
suckers.

The best we can
hope for is some entertainment as the inherent tensions boil to the surface and
Internet-Mana blows up like Krakatoa. How long, for example, before Mana
office-holder John Minto – a conviction politician in the Bradford mould –
spits the dummy? He can only fool himself for so long that the merger is in the
best interests of the proletariat.

Even on their own,
far- Left parties such as Mana have a glorious history of disembowelling
themselves. Who knows what bloody mayhem could result when the hard-core Left hitches
itself to a wholly incompatible ally like the Dotcom party?

* * *

MY FELLOW columnist
Joe Bennett has written in these pages about his irritation at the tone of
phony familiarity adopted by marketers in their sales pitches. I think I know
what he means.

A few weeks ago I received
a card from Telecom announcing its proposed name change. It began with the words
“Hey there”, which is the type of fatuous greeting you might expect from a
cashier at Starbucks.

Genesis
periodically sends me emails with the subject line “Let’s chat”, apparently
unaware that a chat is a two-way dialogue that requires consent from both
parties. Other companies begin their
promotional messages with the words “Hi guys”, at which point I stop reading.

A common marketing
misjudgment, one guaranteed to raise older people’s hackles, is the presumption
that customers are happy to be addressed by their first names.

Members of the generation
that was brought up to address each other as “Mr” or “Mrs”, at least until
invited to do otherwise, are affronted when employees in the bank or insurance
company, who are usually young enough to be their grandchildren, assume the
right to call them “Joe” or “Mary”.

Most are too
polite to say anything, but quietly grit their teeth in resentment.

The problem, of
course, is that corporate marketing departments are run by Generation X-ers who
assume that older customers will be flattered to be addressed as if they are teenage
airheads.

I’m waiting for a
bright young marketing graduate to send me an email with the introductory
words, “Hey, dude”. It can only be a matter of time.

* * *

BIG GOVERNMENT is
now so all-pervasive that many people find it hard to imagine life without it.

That was evident
from a recent minor party leaders’ debate on TV3’s The Nation, in which ACT leader Jamie Whyte was treated as some
sort of freak - or possibly even a traitor - for daring to suggest that New Zealanders don’t need
constant intervention from the state in every aspect of their lives. This is
clearly a dangerous heresy.

Only days later,
Dr Whyte got a similar going-over from Guyon Espiner on Morning Report. It seems we’ve all become so accustomed to the
smothering influence of Big Government – even to the extent of deciding whether
we should have children – that we can’t comprehend any alternative.

Dr Whyte, of
course, believes the state should get out of our lives, save for a few
essential functions. It’s an idea worth exploring, but you get the impression
that for a lot of people, it’s just too scary.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

There's a place for aggressive reporting that pushes the boundaries, and Patrick Gower has become the pacesetter in the parliamentary press gallery - at least in the electronic media. But some of the channel's decisions lately have been downright silly.

It greatly overplayed its exclusive on Kim Dotcom's ownership of a signed copy of Mein Kampf. (Memo to TV3: "exclusive" doesn't necessarily mean it should lead the bulletin.) More recently, it excitedly led with a non-story about Justice Minister Judith Collins firing a pistol in circumstances which, under what could only be called a nitpicking interpretation of the gun laws, might have been technically illegal (but even if it was, didn't amount to a hill of beans). TV3 should note that for all the hype, neither of these stories led anywhere. They were largely ignored by other media, and rightly so.

Now the channel has suffered the unusual humiliation of being rebuked from the bench of the High Court and banned from further camera coverage of the John Banks trial - this, for showing footage last week of Banks absent-mindedly doing something nauseating with ear-wax while listening to the evidence against him.

What was the purpose of this shot? It was utterly gratuitous. It shed no light on the case, it was unnecessarily humiliating to Banks and it was repulsive to look at. Small wonder that Justice Edwin Wylie gave TV3 a whack around the ears.

There's not necessarily any disgrace in a media organisation upsetting the judiciary. In some circumstances it can be a badge of honour. But in this instance, the judge's indignation was entirely justified.

It was a case of TV3 once again getting a bit too clever for its own good. To the channel's credit, TV3 lawyer Clare Bradley, who was evidently party to the decision to screen the shot, now admits it was a bad judgment call.

Amen to that. Perhaps the channel will now dial back its propensity for shock and overkill.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

I accept that some grown men (and, much more rarely, women)
indulge in a form of hero worship. The object of their adoration may be a
sports star, a musician, an actor or even a politician. This mystifies me, because I would
have thought that hero worship is something you grow out of as you mature; but
I accept that it exists, and that it’s essentially harmless.

What I struggle to accept is fawning
admiration of flawed people, as if self-inflicted flaws are worthy of
our approval. This is a particularly common phenomenon in writing about rock
music, where musicians are frequently revered not so much for the quality of their
music as for the quantity of alcohol and drugs they have ingested or for their dysfunctional personalities.
Lou Reed, who was virtually deified by the rock press when he died last year,
was a case in point.

There is another example in yesterday’s edition of Fairfax
Media’s Your Weekend section, in
which Philip Matthews reviews the book Gutter
Black, by the late Dave McArtney, of the 1970s Auckland rock band Hello
Sailor.

Matthews is clearly enthralled by McArtney’s drug habit. He
devotes a big chunk of his review to it, writing with awe
about the role drugs played in the band. The title of Hello Sailor’s song Blue Lady, Matthews tells us, was a coded
junkie tribute to a favourite syringe. The band lived in a house they called
Mandrax Mansion, after a sedative that was fashionable at the time.

When they went to Los Angeles hoping to crack the American
market (a fanciful hope, I would have thought – the band was world-famous in
Ponsonby but was hardly noticed outside New Zealand), McArtney survived an overdose. His bandmate Graham Brazier (who was convicted last year on
charges of assault against his former and current partners, though we hear very
little about that) took heroin at Disneyland. The band spent much of its time in
LA partying at their rented house in the Hollywood Hills, which may help
explain why their mission was a failure (although, on the other hand, the reason may
simply have been that they weren’t as good as they thought they were).

Matthews excitedly relates all this in the apparent belief that
readers will be as impressed as he was by the band’s dissolute lifestyle. The great
irony is that he reports McArtney’s fondness for the needle ultimately led to
his death at 62 from liver cancer. You almost get the impression this is
something Matthews thinks we should all aspire to.

Of course the fact that McArtney died as a result of his
drug habit only serves to enhance his mystique in the eyes of people like Matthews.
The prospect of canonisation into the sainthood of rock music is enormously
enhanced by premature death.

This blog post will almost certainly result in me being accused
of making a callous attack on a dead man. It is nothing of the sort. McArtney was
a stalwart of the Auckland music scene and was obviously much loved. I was
saddened to read of his death. But the fact that his illness was attributed to
his past drug use makes it all the more bizarre that Matthews should romanticise
his lifestyle. He should grow up.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Winston Peters cops it with both barrels in today’s Dominion Post. In his weekly column, former
TV3 political editor Duncan Garner launches a withering attack on the New
Zealand First leader and concludes that the public is tired of his games. On
the same page, Dom Post political editor Tracy Watkins says New Zealand First
is a clock that has been slowly winding down since the 1996 election.
(Remember? That was the pantomime when Peters kept the country in political
limbo for six weeks while he went fishing.)

Both commentators are especially critical of Peters’ vicious
and cowardly counter-attack against his former protégé Brendan Horan, whom he likened
– under parliamentary privilege – to the serial child abuser Jimmy Savile.

It all tends to reinforce a perception that Peters is losing
his mojo. Certainly there has been a marked change in the tone of media
coverage of him in recent weeks, starting with his failure to deliver on the
promise of a killer blow to Judith Collins. The press gallery was almost unanimous in its
scorn for him over that, which leads me to wonder whether they’ve finally had enough of
his bluster and bullshit.

But before those of us who abhor Peters’ political style get
too excited, hang on a minute. Yesterday he held a public meeting in Masterton,
and out of curiosity I went along. The room was packed long before the guest of
honour arrived. I counted more than 100 heads, nearly all of them grey. The
meeting was chaired by octogenarian New Zealand First stalwart George
Groombridge, who deferentially referred to Peters as "the Boss".

For Peters, the 2014 election campaign is already underway.
He spoke, mostly without notes, for nearly an hour. It was vintage Peters,
delivered in that characteristic hoarse staccato bark, and it pushed all the
usual buttons.

We have a government that grovels to wealthy foreign
interests. Immigrants are placing huge demands on housing and infrastructure,
which the rest of us (meaning real New Zealanders) have to pay for. Australian
banks are robbing us blind. The Budget was a big con; the only good thing in it
was the extension of free doctors’ visits for children, and we all know where Bill
English got that idea. Honest, hard-working Kiwis in places like the Wairarapa
are being forced to subsidise the Auckland super-city, which even Aucklanders didn’t
want. We wouldn’t sleep at night if we knew how few police cars were on the job
(and this after New Zealand First heroically pushed Helen Clark’s government into
increasing police numbers by 1000). Wealthy Chinese donors to the National
Party who can’t even speak English are demanding that we change our immigration
policy (“Just try that in Beijing!”). Twenty-one of Barfoot and Thompson’s 25
top real estate agents are Asian. We’re an economic colony of China and
Australia. John Key was the only person in New Zealand who didn’t know in
advance of the raid on the Dotcom mansion, and he’s the minister in charge of
the SIS and GSCB. The free market is a total nonsense. Cameron Slater is a
dysfunctional twit who knows nothing about politics. (Journalists were
repeatedly scorned, but only Slater was paid the compliment of being mentioned
by name.) The most profitable investment in New Zealand is a donation to the
National Party. Chardonnay-drinking clowns have nothing but contempt for the
concerns of ordinary people – “but we’ve got news for them, and it’s all bad”.
And so on, and so on. You get the picture.

Peters repeatedly invoked memories of a kinder, fairer and
more prosperous New Zealand, where everyone pulled their weight and was duly
rewarded for their hard work. There were nostalgic references to Keith
Holyoake, Robert Muldoon (his own political mentor, whose imprint remains all
too visible) and even to the Seddon government of the 1890s.

Underneath all the bluster was a plaintive, and politically potent,
question: how could we allow that legacy to be snatched away from us? It was a
message that resonated sharply with his audience. And while it would be easy to
dismiss the speech as classic populism, it was hard not to feel a grudging admiration
for Peters’ ability to zero in on the National-led government’s weak points. He
certainly has no shortage to choose from.

What was conspicuously missing (not that anyone brought it
up at question time) was any coherent prescription for tackling the issues Peters
sees bedevilling New Zealand. But then, Peters was always, by instinct, an opposition
politician, triumphantly finding fault with everyone else while shirking the
hard work required to come up with workable policy solutions.

Not that this mattered to his adoring audience yesterday.
They hung on his every word, nodding and murmuring in agreement and laughing on
cue even when he said things that weren’t funny.

Now here’s the thing. Most of the people who turned out to hear
Peters in Masterton probably wouldn’t have bothered to read the comments of
Duncan Garner and Tracy Watkins in the paper this morning; and if they had,
they would have dismissed it as the posturing of a Wellington elite that’s out
of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. Winston has told them so, many
times.

And while it’s easy to deride New Zealand First supporters
as frightened and bewildered (I’ve done so myself), they all have a vote. And
nothing I saw or heard yesterday gave me any reason to believe they won’t all
be giving it to Peters – which is why it would be premature to say he’s lost
it, no matter how much we might cherish the thought.

Footnote: Immigration
was a dominant theme of Peters’ speech, but I couldn’t help noting that the
first four people to get to their feet at question time had British accents.
Obviously immigration from the UK is fine; it’s that other lot we don’t want.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

You will have heard of Donald Sterling. He’s the owner –
though probably not for much longer – of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball
team.

Sterling sounds a thoroughly unpleasant man. Last month,
sports website TMZ released a leaked recording of a private conversation in
which the multimillionaire team owner rebuked a close female friend (I’m being
delicate in my terminology here) for associating with black sports stars.

The “friend”, V Stiviano, had posted a picture of herself
with basketball legend Magic Johnson on the social media site Instagram.
Sterling told her it bothered him that she wanted to broadcast the fact that
she was associating with black people.

“You can sleep
with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want,”
Sterling said. “The little I ask you is ... not to bring them to my games.”

The subsequent
uproar reached as far as the White House. Within three days, Adam Silver, the
commissar who runs the National Basketball Association (his official title is
commissioner, but I think commissar is more appropriate in this context),
announced he had banned Sterling from the sport for life, fined him $2.5 million
and ordered him to sell the team.

Silver seems to
be a man with unlimited powers. I’m surprised Sterling escaped the death
penalty, given that it still applies in California.

Okay, you might
say; the man is a grotesque old racist. No argument about that. Then why do I
feel he’s been wronged?

The reason is
that we have crossed an alarming new threshold.

Freedom of speech
is already under sustained attack throughout the Western world. In many
countries, governments and judges are on a mission to outlaw something called
hate speech, which can broadly be defined as the expression of opinions that
somebody – usually a member of a supposedly oppressed minority – finds objectionable
and wants prohibited.

But to the best
of my knowledge, the proponents of hate speech laws have limited their
attention – so far, anyway – to statements made or opinions expressed in
public. What’s different about the Sterling case is that it concerns something
said in private, and to someone he presumably trusted not to repeat it.

This takes things
to a new level. There is probably not a person on earth who would want to be
held publicly accountable for statements that have been made in private, in the
reasonable expectation that their privacy will be respected. But this is what
happened to Sterling.

Where will this
lead? Does it mean, I wonder, that any high-profile figure is now fair game? Is
there no escape from the speech and thought police? Will all prominent people now
fret that their private reflections will be surreptitiously recorded on a smartphone
and released to the media? Whatever happened to notions of privacy?

As it happens, Sterling’s
private beliefs are of little consequence. If he were a politician or public
servant with influence over public policy, they might be a matter of legitimate
concern. But they are simply the private mutterings of a bigoted old man. To
put it bluntly, they are none of the public’s business.

Seen in this
light, the furore was grotesquely disproportionate.

The Sterling
affair raises other important questions. What about Stiviano’s role, for
example? Assuming it was she who leaked the recording, she committed a flagrant
breach of trust and privacy.

On the face of
it, her moral compass is every bit as defective as Sterling’s. Yet Stiviano has
largely escaped public scrutiny. Presumably an octogenarian real
estate tycoon presented a much more satisfying target.

Consider this,
too. Even the most loathsome criminals – mass murderers, serial rapists,
terrorists – are entitled to a defence. But not Sterling. Commissar Silver
effectively tried and sentenced him ex
parte, to use a legal term – in other words, without Sterling being given a
chance to speak for himself.

That Silver was
able unilaterally to fine Sterling $2.5 million, ban him from the sport for
life and force him to sell his team, all without any hearing or opportunity for
Sterling to speak for himself, is a shocking denial of natural justice.

I’m astonished
there wasn’t an outcry. If I were an American, this abuse of power would bother
me far more than Sterling’s private thoughts about whether it was right for Stiviano
to be photographed with black men.

There are
parallels here with the confected outrage that erupted over Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson’s alleged
use of the forbidden N-word in the old “eeny, meeny, miney, moe” children’s rhyme.

Like Sterling,
Clarkson is not an easy man to feel sorry for. He’s a blowhard who uses humour - admittedly with some skill - to mock and denigrate.But the uproar
over his supposed verbal indiscretion was grossly inflated by tabloid media
that love nothing more than to bring down a celebrity.

The alleged
offending word was so mumbled as to be indistinct. Clarkson himself denied
using it. In any case the footage was never broadcast, which should have been
the end of the story. Nonetheless, the tape was leaked – by whom, and for what
reason, isn’t clear – and in the ensuing firestorm, Clarkson was condemned as a
racist.

Even if he did
use the word, does that make him racist? Insensitive, perhaps, and possibly
mischievous, given Clarkson’s fondness for juvenile naughty-boy antics – but
racist? We all used that rhyme innocently as children. It didn’t make racists
out of us.

Clarkson may be a
loudmouth, but racism is a far darker thing. As with the Sterling affair, all
sense of proportion was lost. We are all too busy taking offence.

And then there’s Teuila
Blakely – another victim of instant moral outrage, although one more deserving
of our sympathy than either of the aforementioned men.

A video showing
the Shortland Street actress engaging
in a sex act with rugby league player Konrad Hurrell was leaked, apparently
without Blakeley’s knowledge, on social media.

What Blakely and
Hurrell did was a private act by consenting adults. No offence was committed
and no one was harmed. But that didn’t prevent a wave of vicious abuse directed
at Blakeley, including death threats and exhortations to kill herself. You can
always rely on social media to bring out the lynch mob.

Even more
bizarrely, a $5000 fine was imposed on Hurrell by his rugby league club for
supposedly bringing the game into disrepute.

You’ve got to
laugh at that last bit. Driving an opposing player into the ground head first
and breaking his neck – now that’s what I call bringing rugby league into
disrepute. But the player who did that recently got off with a seven-week ban. It’s
good to know the rugby league authorities have got their priorities right.

Friday, May 16, 2014

FOR WEEKS, political news was
dominated by allegations swirling around Justice Minister Judith Collins. Night
after night, it was the lead item on television news bulletins.

Press Gallery journalists
closed in, sensing a kill. As the breathless disclosures accumulated, it was
easy to get the impression the government was on the ropes.

Then came the reality check.
Two opinion polls indicate the government hasn’t taken the big hit that might
have been expected. In fact the results suggest the public was pretty relaxed
about the whole affair.

A Colmar Brunton poll for TVNZ
asked respondents whether Collins should remain a minister or resign. They were
split 42 per cent each way – hardly a resounding condemnation.

A question about whether her
behaviour would damage the government drew a slightly stronger response, but hardly
a fatal one. Fifty per cent said it was damaging and 42 per cent thought it
would make no difference.

On the crucial question of
whether the Collins affair would be a factor in deciding who to vote for, the
overwhelming response – from 75 per cent – was a ho-hum “not much”.

Those findings were
reinforced by a Stuff.co.nz/Ipsos poll which showed that National’s support has
remained steady while Labour, which might have been expected to benefit
handsomely from the furore, has slipped.

Should we be surprised?
Probably not. The poll results simply confirm that issues which excite
journalists and political junkies often barely register with the wider
populace.

Press Gallery journalists
live and breathe politics. They immerse themselves in detail – who said what,
to whom and when, or who was at dinner and why – and go to great lengths to
join the dots. But the public hasn’t the time or patience for all the minutiae
and often fails to see what the fuss is about.

Maurice Williamson was
different. The public got that. A ministerial phone call to a senior police
officer about a wealthy Chinese donor to the National Party could look nothing
but dodgy.

But the issues in the Collins
affair were harder to explain. The public struggled to see the smoke, let alone
the gun.

Call it the bubble effect.
Britain has the Westminster bubble, America the Washington bubble and New Zealand
the Wellington bubble. The things that fascinate people inside the
bubble – and that means journalists as well as politicians – often fail to
resonate with those on the outside.

* * *

TWITTER is the perfect
protest platform for the social media era. It requires zero effort, no
sacrifice and no risk, yet still imparts a warm glow of self-righteousness.

Millions worldwide have
tweeted their outrage at the terrorist group Boko Haram’s abduction of 300
Nigerian schoolgirls. The fact that weeks had passed before they thought to do
this, and the abductors had long melted into the bush, didn’t seem to matter.
Until it’s happened on Twitter, it hasn’t happened.

Neither did it matter that
the sad-looking African girl whose photo was tweeted in support of the protest
campaign wasn’t from Nigeria and had nothing to do with the abduction.

Who cares whether the photo
was relevant or authentic, when the only purpose is to stir shallow sentiment?
One African girl is as good as the next.

And what will the vacuous
outpourings on Twitter actually achieve? As an article in this paper pointed
out, a video aimed at bringing the murderous Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony to
justice went viral on YouTube two years ago.

Countless millions saw it. For
a few days, Kony was world public enemy No 1. Then social media found something
else to get excited about, and moved on. As it does.

Needless to say, nothing
happened. Kony is still at liberty. People using Twitter and Facebook have the
concentration span of a goldfish. They need to be constantly fed with new
distractions.

There was a time when the act
of protesting required people to put themselves on the line. It meant marching
in the streets or manning picket lines, and risking arrest or abuse. But in the
Twitter age, when it can be done instantly and in comfort, it’s all about
narcissistic self-gratification.

* * *

A MAN BASHES his partner’s
2-year-old son so savagely that half his brain dies, turning into what an
expert medical witness calls a watery mush. The basher is sentenced to 3½ years
in jail.

On the same day, a former
teacher is sentenced on charges of sexual grooming, unlawful sexual connection
with girls under 16, offering to supply methamphetamine and trying to flee the
country on a false passport. He gets 9½ years.

The two men were sentenced
last week. Who was the more monstrous offender? The New Zealand public would
have no trouble deciding, even if judges can’t.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

It seems people around Parliament are asking questions about
former TVNZ political editor Linda Clark’s supposed conflict of interest in
appearing on TV3’s The Nation as a
political commentator while also (reportedly) giving media training to Labour
leader David Cunliffe.

I welcome this, but only if it widens into a broader inquiry
into the murky ethics of political journalists, interviewers and commentators
selling their services to politicians on the side. I fail to see why Clark
should be singled out for scrutiny.

If what I hear is correct, quite a few high-profile media
figures have nice little undisclosed earners providing advice to politicians. In
fact it’s an odd quirk of New Zealand politics that many of the commentators provided
with media platforms for their supposedly objective views are hopelessly
compromised.

If it’s fair to unmask Clark for grazing on both sides of
the fence, then let’s complete the job by exposing all the others who are on
the take. This could get very interesting.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

I have some sympathy for the public service union’s objection to TVNZ’s ban
on political journalists belonging to parties. The ban strikes me as an over-reaction
to an embarrassing failure that was partly of TVNZ’s own making. (I
say “partly” because Shane Taurima’s underhand behaviour was obviously the primary
contributing factor, despite his ludicrous claim to have been vindicated by the
report of an independent panel.)

Gavin Ellis, former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, argued on today’s Morning Report that journalists have to
make a choice between reporting on politics and belonging to a political party.
Some political journalists (I think Colin James is one) go even further to
ensure purity. They don’t vote.

But with all due respect to such principled views, I struggle to accept that
being a political journalist necessarily requires you to neuter yourself as a
citizen.

The crucial issue, surely, is how you do the job.
Journalists should be judged on the fairness and impartiality of their
reporting and commentary. It’s possible to be a party member and still be
even-handed as a journalist.

I can think of relatively high-profile journalists who hold
strong left-wing views in private but still manage to do their work with
integrity, as the journalists’ code of ethics requires. There are also journalists
and commentators (Paul Henry and John Campbell, for example) who quite
openly lean one way or the other – but since their politics are no secret,
viewers can decide for themselves how much weight to place on whatever they
might say.

These are not the people who worry me. The ones we
should really be concerned about are the journalists who hold pronounced political views
that are not declared, but which permeate their reportage. There are a lot of
them about, probably more than ever before, and they will never be controlled
by arbitrary rules – such as TVNZ is now imposing – about declarations of political
interest.

If such people have no qualms about exercising bias in their work, they are
not going to feel compelled to fess up to the boss. They are answerable only to
their own conscience, which isn’t much help if they don’t possess one.

Monday, May 12, 2014

I believe our television current affairs interviewers
do a pretty good job. Both The
Nation and Q+A have been generally well
served by interviewers who have been fair and even-handed, asked intelligent
questions and been tough without indulging in gratuitous blood-letting. But I
thought Q+A’s Susan Wood let herself down
at the weekend.

Even before interviewing Professor Marilyn Waring, Wood gave
us a taste of what to expect by describing Waring as “one of our most
influential thinkers”. Really?

To be fair, Waring deserves everlasting credit for having
the guts to stand up to Robert Muldoon, unlike the pusillanimous male
lickspittles with whom he surrounded himself (and Q+A obligingly reminded us who some of them were by showing the famous
footage of a clearly under-the-weather Muldoon, surrounded by his inner circle,
announcing the 1984 snap election that Waring precipitated by announcing she
would cross the floor).

But one of our most influential thinkers? Influential to
whom, exactly?

Wood then proceeded to conduct possibly the softest interview
I’ve seen on Q+A, nodding sympathetically
throughout as Waring recited a drearily familiar left-wing litany of
grievances. Essentially her message is that the much-touted rock star economy is
an illusion and that New Zealanders are being hoodwinked by spinmeisters. (Subtext:
we’re all too dumb to understand economics and need people like Waring, who objects
to people putting an “ideological” spin on the subject – I particularly liked
that bit and thought she did well to keep a straight face, given her own
leanings– to explain what’s really going on.)

These are perfectly legitimate views, and I could even agree
with Waring on one point: namely, that damage to our waterways means the public
is at least partly bearing the cost of the dairying boom. But what I object to is that she sailed
through the interview without once being challenged. Wood smiled benignly
throughout, as if she were in the presence of a much-loved and slightly eccentric
maiden aunt. That’s not a privilege extended to other guests on Q+A.

I could only conclude that Waring is one of Wood’s heroes.
And that would be fair enough too, provided she didn’t make it so painfully
obvious.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

It is possible to be intelligent and a buffoon. Maurice
Williamson is such a man.

He can’t be a complete thicko, because despite what people
think about politicians, it’s hard to remain an MP for 27 years – and hold down
several ministerial posts – without a modicum of intellect.

Besides, Williamson has a degree in computer science and
applied mathematics.

But there is intelligence and there is intelligence. There
is the type of intelligence that enables people to get degrees in subjects
that, to lesser beings like me, sound impossibly pointy-headed.

Then there is the type of intelligence that enables people
to make sound judgments. It’s the type of intelligence that stops you from
making a dick of yourself. It’s the little voice in your head that says, “Whoa!
Don’t go there”.

There doesn’t seem to be any such voice in Williamson’s
head. That makes him accident-prone – the type of politician who makes party
leaders and whips feel nervous.

From time to time throughout his career, his propensity for
saying things that were probably better left unsaid has got him into bother.

In 2003 he broke ranks by criticising the performance of the
then National Party leader, Bill English. He may have been saying what other National
MPs were thinking, but others held their tongues while Williamson sounded off. Predictably,
he found himself isolated and was suspended from the party caucus.

In 2010 he made a lame, if harmless, after-dinner joke that
offended Muslims. A more prudent politician, knowing how touchy religious
minorities can be, would have resisted the temptation to play for a cheap laugh
– especially when he represents a multicultural electorate such as Pakuranga,
whose population is nearly 30 per cent Asian.

But that’s the sort of man Williamson is. He’s the class
clown. He gives the impression that he just can’t help himself.

And sometimes, it must be said, this works to his advantage
– never more so than when he gave his famous speech in Parliament ridiculing opponents
of same-sex marriage.

That made him an unlikely international hero overnight, but
to me it just confirmed that he can’t suppress the urge to show off.

There was a less endearing side to that speech. Many of Williamson’s
own constituents and party supporters would have opposed the same-sex marriage
bill, for sincere and deeply felt reasons. But to Williamson, they were fair
game for derision and mockery.

To me, that speech exposed him not only as someone who loves
to be the centre of attention, but as a bigot in reverse – a man contemptuous
of anyone who didn’t share his progressive views, and happy to have fun at
their expense.

Given this background, it was no great surprise that Williamson
had to resign his ministerial portfolios last week after he caused deep
embarrassment to his party.

This was more than just another case of him shooting his
mouth off. This time there was a serious moral dimension to his lack of
judgment.

It’s hard to believe he could see nothing wrong in phoning a
senior police officer about domestic violence charges faced by the wealthy businessman
Donghua Liu, on whose behalf he had previously lobbied for citizenship.

A drover’s dog could see that it screamed impropriety.
Either Williamson’s political blind spot is even bigger than we imagined – so
big, in fact, as to block out his vision entirely – or there was something more
disturbing going on.

In an interview with TV3’s John Campbell, Williamson tried
to distance himself from Liu but failed wretchedly. It turned out that Liu, on Williamson’s
suggestion, had bought the house next door to his own holiday home at Pauanui,
on the Coromandel Peninsula – and that Williamson had done work on the house
for him and even used it himself.

Added to the revelation that Liu’s citizenship ceremony took
place in Williamson’s electorate office, this made nonsense of his
protestations that they weren’t really friends.

And the most damning aspect of all, of course, is that a
company associated with Liu made a $22,000 donation to the National Party.

Now, think about this. In the latest annual global
corruption survey conducted by Transparency International, New Zealand and
Denmark were rated the world’s most corruption-free countries.

That’s a status we should be proud of, and determined to
protect. It sharply distinguishes us from Australia, where corruption is rampant.
But I wonder how much longer we will be able to make that claim.

No one has alleged Williamson is corrupt, but appearances
matter. It smells – there’s no other word for it – when a cabinet minister
lobbies on behalf of a wealthy immigrant businessman and a generous donation
subsequently turns up in party coffers.

The odour intensifies when the minister phones the police
about their investigations into criminal charges against the businessman,
pointing out to them that he’s an important investor in New Zealand.

This comes on top of the John Banks/Kim Dotcom scandal and
the suspicions swirling around Justice Minister Judith Collins and her
association with the Chinese company Oravida. Those controversies, too, involve
wealthy business interests and generous donations.

I don’t accept that Collins has crossed the line in the way Williamson
did, although there’s persuasive evidence of a conflict of interest. But the
truly worrying thing is that there’s a pattern here.

In other countries, it has long been accepted that money is
paid for political favours. In China, especially, corruption is part of the
business and political landscape.

Now it’s starting to look as if that’s the way we do
business here, too; that the government’s door is open to whoever produces a fat
chequebook. But that’s not the New Zealand way, and nor do we want it to be.

This year’s election is National’s to lose. It’s said that
elections are lost by governments rather than won by oppositions, and this government
is looking increasingly tainted by its murky associations with wealthy business
interests.

Prime minister John Key promptly cut Williamson loose, but I
wonder if public distaste has passed the point where it can be neatly managed
with the usual damage control strategies. The next opinion polls may tell us.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

HEARD OF Barraco
Barner? Possibly not. But according to a 20-year-old English beautician, he’s
the president of Britain and he really shouldn’t be getting involved in
Ukraine’s problems.

Here, starkly laid
bare, is the one of the downsides of social media and the digital information
revolution. Instant opinion, zero knowledge.

Gemma Worrall from
Blackpool wrote on Twitter that it was “scary” that “our president Barraco
Barner” was tangling with Russia. But the truly scary thing is that someone who
thought that Britain had a president, and that his name was Barraco Barner,
could so innocently display their rank ignorance for the world to see.

Ms Worrall’s tweet
shines a light on the existence of people whose view of the world is formed not
from the printed word, but from whatever they happen to overhear.

If she had seen
Barack Obama’s name in print, it’s unlikely she would have been so gravely
misled as to how it’s spelled. But clearly, she’d only ever heard it – perhaps
from customers chatting in the beauty parlour where she works, or from a TV set
playing in the background.

Add to that Ms
Worrall’s obvious belief that the world needed to hear her considered views on
Barraco Barner and Russia, and you have a lethal confection of foolishness and
conceit.

On the other hand,
these things are self-correcting. As her gaffe was re-tweeted worldwide,
thousands gleefully pounced, sneering at her error.

You might say this
is a good thing. A mistake was promptly exposed and corrected. But in the
process, another unlovely aspect of social media was laid bare: namely, the
propensity for abuse and bullying by anonymous cowards.

Never in human
history has it been easier for someone like Ms Worrall to express their
thoughts so instantly or freely, without the moderating intervention of someone
who might save them from embarrassment. And never has it been easier for others
to join in mob nastiness.

You could argue
that this is all very democratic. But is it progress?

* * *

I HAVE DOUBTS,
too, about the explosion in online opinion, even when it’s written by people
who know very well who Barack Obama is and how his name is spelled.

University of
Otago political scientist Bryce Edwards collates online political comment every
day and emails a summary to people who are interested in politics and curious
to know what others are thinking.

What’s notable is
that the volume increases with every week, to the point where it has become
almost indigestible.

On Monday I
counted 67 commentaries on the subject of Shane Jones’ departure from the
Labour Party. These ranged from generally dispassionate comment in mainstream
media to partisan rants by bloggers from both sides of the political fence. The
previous Thursday, Edwards disseminated 51 commentaries on the same subject.

As political
comment proliferates and the tone becomes more trenchant, so the temptation to
tune out – or at least to exercise greater discretion about how much of it one
bothers to read – increases. The law of diminishing returns kicks in.

In the early days
of the Internet, someone cleverly said that trying to keep up with the flow of
information it unleashed was like drinking from a fire hose. I don’t know what
you’d compare it with now.

Having one’s say
has never been easier, but the clamour and static sometimes threatens to
overwhelm reasoned debate.

* * *

IN THIS paper a
couple of weeks ago, Ross Bell of the Drug Foundation claimed New Zealanders
are “comparatively high” users of both marijuana and alcohol.

In fact OECD
figures for 2011 show per capita consumption of liquor in New Zealand was 9.5
litres. That’s exactly the OECD average – hardly something to get in a panic
about, especially when you consider that some countries on the table, such as
Turkey and Israel, have low levels of consumption because of religious factors.

New Zealand was
placed 10th of the 19 OECD countries for which statistics were
available. More complete figures for 2009 show we drank less, per head, than
comparable countries such as Britain and Australia.

What’s more,
Ministry of Health figures show that drinking across all New Zealand age groups
is in steady decline, and “binge drinking” by young people – contrary to what
panic merchants like Mr Bell will tell you – has fallen off sharply over the
past 10 years.

These facts appear
not to matter to the neo-wowser lobby, which continues to promote the myth that
we need to be protected from the machinations of wicked “booze barons”.

And there’s
another thing. Just who are these booze barons? The term might have meant
something in the 1930s, when men like Sir Ernest Davis controlled the brewing
and hotel industries, but these days it’s just a crudely emotive propaganda
tool.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Browsing through a copy of the recently published biography The Mighty Totara: The Life and Times of Norman Kirk, by David Grant, I came across a reference to the late W P Reeves.

Wellington newspaper readers of a certain age will remember that name. Bill Reeves was editor of The Dominion from 1964 to 1968 and for more than two decades thereafter, wrote an eloquent weekly column called Stand-Off: A Radical View.
To my astonishment, Grant - a Wellington historian - describes Reeves in the book as "an unashamed right-winger". He couldn't be more wrong.

As I wrote in this blog at the time of Bill's death in 2009, he was a gentlemanly, left-leaning liberal of the old school. If Grant had taken the trouble to read his columns, he would have realised this.

I wonder whether he made the mistake of assuming that because The Dominion was founded by conservative business and professional men, and taken over in 1964 by a young Rupert Murdoch, anyone who wrote for it must have been, ipso facto, a reactionary. But Reeves certainly wasn't, and it's an insult to his memory to suggest he was.

In fact the Dom, paradoxically, was staffed in those days by journalists who generally tilted to the left. Even Murdoch himself was something of a liberal then.

It's worrying that an error like this will become part of the historical record. I can't help wondering what else Grant might have got wrong.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.